THE county’s clinical commissioning group is a body many people will have never heard of.

But its budget is huge – around £650m.

So when the top man at the organisation in charge of delivering GP and community health care in Oxfordshire talks about the need for changes in the wake of the budget cuts it has announced recently, we should all take notice.

A series of meetings will be held at which members of the public will be invited to say what should be spared the axe in any funding cuts programme.

It has echoes of the string of meetings held recently by Oxfordshire County Council over its own planned cuts.

Those meetings attracted a healthy turnout of concerned residents, and what is important now is that people go along to this new round of consultation.

Anyone who does not do so will have less room to complain when they are not happy about things at their local hospital.

Yet at the same time, people have to be realistic.

If cuts do have to be made, not everything can be saved.

Therefore, there are choices to be made – and people cannot just put forward a wishlist with everything on it.

Like at Christmas time, many people will end up disappointed.

But at least if they pipe up, they can help those in charge to make a more informed decision.